Abstract

Pipeline generally extends over long distances traversing through wide variety of different
soils, geological conditions and regions with different seismicity and ground motions.
Vulnerability of the pipeline due to seismic hazards can be divided in to three categories i.e.
hazard due to ground vibration, hazard due to faulting and hazard due to permanent
ground deformation (PGD). Though there are no severe damage were observed due ground
vibration in the modern buried pipeline though it may trigger to secondary effect of landsliding
and ground motion due to liquefaction. Main stream researches in past especially
analytical models are limited to strike slip fault motions with tension in pipe case only. As
the large geometric changes incorporating in analytical study is a tricky task; however
pipeline subjected to the large ground motion itself is a phenomenon of large geometric
changes. Especially when pipeline subjected to compression, where in addition to material
deformation it also undergoes general as well as local buckling with bending,
contradictorily past work mostly assumed that pipeline is under tension.
With day by day increasing capacity of computation and advancement in numerical
modelling, one can find more facts for pipeline subjected to large motions including cases
of pipe under compression as well. In this paper, past work is reviewed for pipeline
subjected to large ground motion. A three dimensional FE based numerical model is
suggested to carry out pipeline performance of buried pipeline subjected to large motion. A
proposed model includes material nonlinearity, as well as considers the large geometric
deformation. For this purpose, three dimensional FE program is developed using MATLAB.
Displacement controlled Arc-length technique is implemented to solve the nonlinear
behavior. To reduce the computation time of analysis here parallelization tool kit of
MATLAB is utilized.
Keywords: Buried continuous pipeline; Large ground motion; Nonlinear-large deformation
FEM; Displacement controlled Arc-length technique.